thank goodness for button-them-together double quilts, i say. take an autumn weight 9 tog, button on a summery 4 tog and you get a very warming 13 togger to keep these winter chills at bay. does anyone actually know, or indeed care, what tog means?
and so, this is Christmas. and what have you done?
well, thank you for asking. i've been to visit the mum, adding an extra twist to proceedings by taking the ex boyfriend along. needless to say both mum and nan seemed to prefer him to me. is it just in our family that our relatives always seem to prefer our friends to us, their next of kin? i sometimes think they probably don't like us very much. they love us to bits, of course, after all we are their flesh and blood, but i don't think they'd want to sit next to us (sisters and I) on a long train journey, or be stranded with us on a desert island.
thank goodness for therapy (lots of goodness to thank today!).
and while we're not on the subject of dancing, may i just ask why is it that some girls seem incapable of going onto a dancefloor without waving their arms around in the air. it's like an epidemic. pingyarmup syndrome. there you are, having a little bop when suddenly, seemingly without your consent, first your hands, then your elbows begin to creep up to the side of your head and before you know it you are swaying around looking like Jodie Foster in Nell. did someone once tell someone that this was 'sexeh!', because if so, i'd like to set the record straight that it isn't.
and if you've got long hair, that somehow gets tangled up in an acute attack of pingyarmup it's most definitely not 'hawt'! i recommend dancing with a pair of 8KG dumbbells in your hands. this should help keep them out of harms way.

follow the thread

On my way back from Pret (mayonaisse with that? How about some extra mayonaisse?) I cleverly managed to get the strap of the belt of my coat stuck in the buckle (how much or a trannie or weirdo does that make me sound? Like I’m wearing a safari suit in December, which btw, I’m not. I’m wearing a belstaff ripoff: black, greased-ish, with said buckle). Anyway, don’t ask me how as I don’t know how I managed but got the strap stuck and was forced to yank it out. This, somehow, pulled a bit of thread out so that it was wrapped round the buckle*. The only way to sort it out was to cut myself out of my belt. As I did this, I held one end of the string in my hand which caused my belt to bob around mid-air as if it had a life of it’s own. This reminded me (finally, I get to the point) of those funny toys you got in the 70s that were like overly fluffy pipe cleaners attached to lengths of invisible thread that you would pull around your person making it look like there was a flourescent caterpillar wriggling all over you. Crazy. And slightly disturbing as they used to whizz around quite quickly.
*talking of getting things caught, I once went ‘up west’ with my mum and sisters one Christmas and we went to The Oxford Walk. Younger readers will know this retail hotspot as The Plaza on Oxford Street but back in the day, it (thought it) gave Brent Cross a run for its money. Upstairs was one of those photographic studios where you could get sepia-tinted pictures of yourself in olde-worlde costumes (remember The Good Old Days on TV?), which sisters and I duly did. My nan still has one on one of her units.
Anyway, back in the 20th century we headed down the escalator back down to Oxford Street and somehow I managed to get my brand new black and white mohair jumper caught in the side of the moving staircase, causing a thread to pull and causing me to be sucked into the side of the escalator. I remember that horrible feeling of rising panic as I realised I was trapped. Only a quick thinking passer by saved the day by pulling my jumper and me out of the metal jaws of impending death or at the very least disfigurement. The jumper was ruined.
Another jumper that I lost in an unfortunate manner was the first I ever knitted. Yes, I knitted! And this was long before it was a trendy pursuit. I knitted myself a fluffy grey number with a low neck (OK, my nan had to help me sew it up) and I loved it. I was about 14 at the time and Skinderella-style skinny having started to shed the puppy fat that had helped make my life miserable for the previous decade and a half. I also made the fatal mistake of lending the jumper to my mate Geraldine who had (and indeed continues to have) rather large breasts. When I got my jumper back it was stretched beyond wearability around the chest area and fit only to be gifted to someone with huge breasts.
I still love my knitwear.

mary poppins!

I was, in my younger days, something of ‘a goer’. Now there’s a word that you don’t hear very often. Definitely one due for a revival, along with referring to someone as a bike. In fact, I think I’m going to start referring to myself as the office bike and see if there’s any improvement in my love life (and another one due for rediscovery).
Anyway, in my younger days I used to like to party. Hard. No pill, powder, paper and paste was safe if I was around.
One evening, getting ready to go out with mates one of them announces: ‘you must try this’ before putting something round and white in my mouth.
20 minutes later and I suddenly feel like an elephant with 10 tonne eyelids.
How hilarious – my friends had given me a sleeping pill. I was furious as I really wanted to go out that evening but had to go to bed, where I slept until the next morning and woke up feeling seriously groggy.
I’d completely forgotten about that until reading the story of the young girl who had been kidnapped by her own mum but who had, for a couple of years before then, been regularly drugged with valium. Not only was she doped, she was then sent to school. Now that’s unkind.

school dinners

slow Friday. alone in the office but let's not get too existential, eh? whatever happened to chocolate custard? everyone, at some point during their school days, ate chocolate sponge with chocolate custard. these days you never see it on menus anywhere!